Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Minecraft Is Ruining My Life

Plenty of things can change someone's life; divorce, sickness, or even death. However, my life has been changing due to something a little differently lately-Minecraft. This game is addictive. If you haven't played it before, you don't even know. Don't try it out. In fact, don't even think about it. Run man, RUN!

Anyway, the Classic version of the game is pretty entertaining on its own. It's basically just a huge sandbox game where you build with different blocks. There isn't much to it, but I found myself playing it for hours on end. It even started interfering with other parts of my life, because I couldn't get it out of my head. It was like a bad nicotine addiction, but turned all the way up to 11. It only got worse when I started playing the Alpha.

Unlike Classic, you have to actually do something to get your building materials. When I first started, I'm pretty sure some sort of divine entity tried to show me some mercy; I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out how to break blocks. I kept clicking on them, but they weren't breaking like they did in Classic. "This is dumb," I thought and abandoned the game. I should have stayed away.

One of my friends told me how to mine blocks. It was the beginning of the end, I guess. Soon, I had stone tools, stacks of wood, and a pretty glass window. I was king of my world, and my shelter was totally safe from monsters.

Oh god, the monsters.

There are quite a few monsters, or "mobs" as they're officially called, in the game. Some of them are classics, such as the zombies and skeletons that creep around everywhere. Speaking of creeping, there are more dangerous mobs like creepers. Unfortunately, creepers aren't just scary old men that follow children; in Minecraft, they're big, walking green things that explode in your face when you get near them.

These things are scary. You learn to fear them when you're in caves or whenever you get trapped outside in the dark. You start to be incredibly alert when going anywhere, even in the day, and the sounds start to get to you. You hear sounds everywhere-moans, groans, twangs, slurps, all that fun stuff. It's just terrifying.

I was recently mining in a cave I'd recently lit up. Despite being mostly lit with torches, I was still really scared that there were monsters lurking somewhere. I knew they were there. I could feel them. It'd been a long day of collecting iron and coal from this particular shaft, so I went back up to the entrance to my cave. To my horror, it was night outside. Fearful for my life, I quickly erected a small dirt hut to protect me. It was ridiculous and extreme, but it made me feel secure and safe. I couldn't see those hungry, lusty eyes in the darkness anymore, and that was cool with me.

I spend hours a day playing Minecraft. Sometimes I'm adding to my shelter, other times I'm gathering resources. The world I'm in right now is almost completely self-sustaining, so I have to occupy my time there doing other time consuming things. One of my first big projects was hollowing out 1492 blocks to make a huge underwater room to grow trees in. It took a ton of time, and I'm not even sure why I bothered doing it. Despite that, it's still my crowning achievement. I've since added on to it, creating sub-farms for other crops like wheat and cacti. I probably have a good three hours into that room alone.

All of that is pretty sane so far. It's only a game, right?

It's been two or three months since I started playing Minecraft, and lately I've started seeing and hearing things. Horrible things. At night, I hear moaning; perhaps other Minecrafters in similar positions calling for help? I see skeletons bouncing around outside my window, and around every corner I glimpse the green, pixelated skin of a creeper. I expect to hear the Minecraftian door sound whenever I push on a door, and I sometimes forget that there are shapes other than blocks.

My mind is slowly being eaten away by this treacherously addictive game, and I can't do a thing about it. Maybe I'm an addict. Dictionary.com defines an addiction as "the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma."

I think Minecraft pretty much fits the bill here. It's super habit-forming, and it's probably causing severe trauma to my mind. I can see this wonderful, horrible game being as hotly debated as marijuana is right now. It's just that good/bad.


2 comments:

  1. If someone could turn Minecraft into a platform for education, it would make the game a lot more useful.

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  2. Managed to get it off the PC only to find it lurking on Xbox. OK am now living on the side of a mountain in a glass house jutting out over the he sea like ironman. I hate this game.

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